658 | KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 
lution of the organic kingdom seems like a continually ascending spiral rising 
into ever widening cycles of multiform life, which now and then by the accumu- 
lation or creation of force starts forth into sudden and paroxysmal forms of devel- 
opment. 
Evolution is now received as the working hypothesis in biology by which are 
settled all questions concerning organic types and classifications. Classifications 
in biology are no longer, as formerly, based on external and non-essential resem- 
blances, but on essential gemeftc relationships. On this point Prof. Gray, our 
most eminent American botanist, says: ‘‘ Taken as a working hypothesis, the 
doctrine of the derivation of species serves well for the co-ordination of all the 
facts in botany, and affords a probable and reasonable answer to a long series of 
questions which, without it, are totally unanswerable.” 
But in no department of investigation has the success of evolution in solving 
difficult problems been greater than in psychology. One of the great problems 
of psychology from Plato to the present time has been to explain the correspond- 
ence between the world of mind and the world of things. Now, if a theory is 
to be tested by its ability to explain questians which all others have failed to 
answer, then Evolution should be regarded as possessing the highest scientific 
value. The theory of evolution explains the intuitions or innate forms of thought 
in a manner so satisfactory as to make all previous efforts appear fanciful. It 
views the mind, not as a metaphysical entity acting in vacuo, but as a definite 
structure, an organism, eudowed with special facilities which have been moulded 
into their present form through a continuous interaction with environing forces. 
The effects thus produced by the law of heredity are transmissible, so that what 
was ancestral experience becomes in the individual an innate endowment of mental 
faculty. Hence, the correspondence between the mental faculties and the external 
world must be interpreted as due to the latter acting on and modifying the former 
in conformity with itself. Mind is thus brought within the category of organism, 
the fundamental law of which is Evolution; and as a complex structure due to 
the workings of this law, it grows and develops in conformity to surrounding 
forces and conditions. 
In view, therefore, of the great variety of proof in support of Evolution in 
which all the various orders of cosmic phenomena find their unity and explana- 
tion, we think the Synthetic Philosophy may justly be regarded as the orvganon of 
the sciences, as indicated in the title of this essay. 
Ir is feared that the Danish steamer Oscar Dickson, with an exploring party, 
has been lost in the Siberian Polar Seas. This is the Sweedish vessel which was 
named after Dr. Dickson, of Gothenberg, Sweeden, who equipped the last expe- 
dition of Prof. Nordenskjold. 
